rap music – Welcome to Third Age Thoughts

– In which Dorn provides some updates on past posts.

orn’s mysterious illness

The good news about having a fancy city doctor is that they have access to esoteric information and equipment that the country folk might not have. The bad news is that it can take a long time to make use of it.

I had a six-week wait between when my new doctor identified my mystery illness (first described in this post) and when I could take the video capsule endoscopy that would confirm it. But the day finally came.

They fitted me with a belt containing a receiver and a little TV monitor, and gave me a video camera pill to swallow. It was the size and shape of a large vitamin capsule, or a small Weeble, and one end had a clear dome, inside of which was a flashing strobe light and (I assume) a camera. I swallowed it and we watched it descend my throat on the little monitor. (And “no”, they said, “you can’t watch it progressing through your system all day. The monitor is just for the initial check.”)

Without the Dorn-cam to watch, the rest of the day was pretty dull. I was up near Baltimore, too far to drive home just to turn around and drive back for the procedure closeout. I wasn’t allowed to eat, drink, sleep, sit still, or exercise, so I went to the library for the day. At the end of the day, they took their receiver belt back and sent me home. They didn’t want the camera-pill back, and said I’d know when it was expelled.

When I asked how to be sure the camera was really gone, they said they could order an xray of the area. That certainly didn’t seem very efficient to me. With the wonders of modern digital miniaturization, I figured they could make the capsule start beeping or something after 8 hours (or however long the expected transit time is). Or even better—it could vibrate! Then its presence would be announced more discreetly and more, um, agreeably.

In a couple of days, the doc reported that the pictures had confirmed and located the damage in my intestine. Now I’ve got another procedure scheduled to send another Mars rover up and zap the problem (“zap” is apparently the technical term of art for the procedure). That will happen in another a few weeks. If anything interesting happens then, I’ll let you know.

Rapper name

(Update of this post.) The same day as my internal video debut, in the parking garage by the library, I saw painted on one of the walls the logo of the 2015 Superbowl. It looked like an ad, but what it was doing on a concrete interior wall in Towson I have no idea, especially considering neither Baltimore nor any other local team was playing (it was, I think, the Seahawks v the Patriots). But what most caught my eye was the Roman designation for the 49th Superbowl: XLIX.

Now there’s a rapper name for you: X-LIX! It sounds kind of naughty, vaguely demonic even, and it rolls off the tongue easily. And it sounds familiar, like a real word, even though it isn’t.

The sound of the name reminded me of Bela Oxmyx (“OX-mix”), a space alien/south Chicago gangster who appeared in a 1968 episode of the original Star Trek series called “A Piece of the Action”. What a great episode, in which Mr Spock speaks that memorable line, “I’d advise youse to keep dialing, Oxmyx!”.

What a great show, in fact! I remember wanting to quit my Boy Scout troop because they insisted on meeting on Thursday evenings, when Star Trek came on. And in those days, children, if you didn’t see a TV show at the one time it was broadcast, you didn’t see it at all until six months later during summer reruns (which were also aired on Thursday evenings)! And there was no Youtube or social media to read about it, you just had to admit to your friends in school next day that you missed it, ask them what happened, and let them gloat. The kids these days, they don’t know how easy they’ve got it!

But oh, the horror! It’s occurred to me the real reason why the rapper name X-LIX sounds so familiar to me! It’s not Oxmyx at all, it’s that it is only one letter away from that constipation medicine Ex-Lax! Oh cruel fate! That’s the stereotypical old man medicine, and a death sentence for a hipster rapper wannabe! My rapper routine might as well consist of shuffling across the stage muttering about you young hooligans! while wearing my fuzzy slippers and a bathrobe over an “I’m for Joe” t-shirt. Oh well, can’t have that. The name search continues.

Side note: I’m noticing that the fraction of my posts that deal with my GI tract is disconcertingly high. If I had known things would trend this way, I might have thought twice about starting to blog at all (or about getting old). Still, “write what you know”, as they say.

Continued in part 2, with updates on my semi-vegetarian conversion and other news.

Thanks!
Dorn
11-13-2019

– in which Dorn almost breaks into the rapper industry, but has branding issues.

eaching the Third Age is all about thinking about new careers. With Kathleen’s encouragement I decided it was time to become a rapper. I had already done most of the heavy lifting for the job—everyone knows that 90% of rapper success comes from having the right name, and I had picked out mine: “Beau Tox”.

But before I started, I had to make sure that some upstart rapper hadn’t already claimed this name, so I did an exhaustive search (using both Bing and Google). And it turns out the name is already being used by a Belgian techno-rapper. At least, I think he’s a rapper. There’s little background info on his site, and his tracks seem like easy-listening electro-pop background music with inoffensive (I don’t speak Belgian, but they sound inoffensive) lyrics delivered in rap style on a few of them.

I could probably survive a co-named competitor in faraway Belgium, but I had a bigger pig jostling for space at the Beau Tox trough: a social media star already has that name. He is apparently quite famous, mostly for being a lovable dog with a somewhat disfigured face.

Not encouraging. There are also Beau-Tox cosmetic surgery salons in Palm Beach, FL, Tribeca, NY, England, Australia, and probably elsewhere. I suspected this might be the case—the name is just too apt for that type of clinic to pass up—but I didn’t think this association would be close enough to be fatal to my career. After all, they sell Ice Tea and Ice Cubes in the grocery store, and those guys did fine.

More interestingly, there’s a Dick Tracy villian, the plastic surgeon “Dr. Beau Tox”, who gives new faces to criminals No Face and Prune Hilda. A vain Tess and Dick Tracy come in for facelifts as well, and criminal hijinks ensue, as they say. The comic can be read here, or there’s a short synopsis here.

comic: "Meanwhile... 'I gotta have a new face, Doctor Tox. But I can't decide between a Salvador Dali, or...' "

But my favorite name pre-empter (or I should say pre-emptress) was Carlötta Beautox—“actress, thinktress, influenceress”—whose adventures trying to make it big in Hollywood can be followed in an apple podcast. It’s a funny, friendly little number full of pop culture references and silly running jokes (like everyone pronouncing her stage name byew-tox).

I couldn’t stand up to this kind of competition. I thought about reverting to my runner-up rapper name (and believe me, it was a distant second), “Butt Tox”. But I ran the mandatory Google due diligence on it and found that it also had been pre-empted, and not even by fashionable items like those above! There was Butt-tox the toilet seat sanitizer, and an ad for buttock botox injections that includes this enticement,

IS BUTT-TOX THE INJECTION YOU NEVER KNEW YOU NEEDED? There’s lots of reasons you should be sticking Botox in your butt. And while I’ll examine a few of them here, with 100 degree days coming and WAY TOO MANY OF YOU leaving sweat stains on the subway, we’ll start here.

I know when I’m beaten. I’m giving up on the rapper business for something where the name competition is not as as cut-throat.

Maybe I’ll be a writer! Now, if I can only think of a pen name…

Thanks! Tell your friends about us if you like us!
Dorn
10/17/2019

Tag: rap music

Catchups and closure (part 1)

Call me ‘Beau’